Expect to find him at any supposedly A-list gathering of London's cultural glitterati. If he's not there - black-browed and bronzed, designer-suited but intense - you probably shouldn't be either. An attentive throng will probably surround him. If you can get close enough, prepare to be amazed by the names he will be dropping. Those who are icons to you, to him are intimates. Salman Rushdie? David Bowie? Philip Roth? Arthur Miller? Orson Welles? You name them, they are his chums (or were his chums, if Luvvie Heaven has claimed them).
For this is Alan Yentob, longest-standing of the BBC's top panjandrums and the only one who is a real "creative". More to the point, this is Alan Yentob, colossus of Britain's artistic landscape for the past quarter of a century. From his base at the Television Centre, his tentacles have penetrated the far corners of the artsy universe. His brooding presence has dignified the boards of the Royal Court, the South Bank Centre, the Architecture Foundation. Every salon of influence has echoed to his witty quips. His whims have touched a thousand careers. Awed whispers suggest that his network of connections may even pip Melvyn Bragg's.
And yet, the actual impact of this mighty figure is not so obvious. Yentob has produced nothing to match Lord Bragg's now critically acclaimed literary oeuvre. No aesthetic style, no school of thought, not even a programme format or slate of epigrams carries the Yentob stamp. The topmost levers of cultural power have remained beyond his reach. So a question presents itself: is this man really a creative giant, or just an arty-farty popinjay?
Now, perhaps, we are to find out. To his quiverful of extra-curricular activities, Yentob has just added the chairmanship of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. This is the post which Ivan Massow was forced to relinquish after opining in the New Statesman that much conceptual art is "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat". To you, this may seem a statement of the obvious, but it was too much for the institute's council.
The ICA is one of those saddest of organisations, an outfit tasked to be cutting-edge which has grown old and out-of-touch. Forever doomed to play hip, it has long been subsumed in the fatal embrace of the establishment. Well-wishers say it needs to be taken by the scruff of the neck and propelled towards the sound of creative gunfire. Yentob has never done anything quite like that. At the age of 55, can he do it now? Or will the ICA become just another venue for high-stepper hobnobbing? Clues can be found in Yentob's life to date.
The dramatic looks that so distinguish him from his grey BBC peers are no genetic accident. He was born to a family of Sephardic Jews who had only recently arrived in Britain from Iraq. After such an exotic beginning, perhaps you expect to hear of a grim childhood followed by long years in a garret, dedicated to the thankless pursuit of an obscure artistic vocation.
If so, prepare to be disappointed. Yentob pere quickly became a successful glove manufacturer. He sent young Alan to board at the King's School, Ely. Then came the Sorbonne, followed by the universities of Grenoble and Leeds. At 21, Yentob went straight into the BBC as a general trainee, and at once proclaimed he had found his true home. Since then, he has never worked anywhere else, even for a day.
His first 18 years were all spent in the arts department, beginning to fill that contacts book but also working in cutting rooms long into the night, cigarette and glass in hand. Eventually, he was made editor of a new programme called Arena. It dazzled with its highly original monographs of subjects such as David Bowie, Sinatra's "My Way" or the Ford Cortina. There are those who say much of the real achievement was down to unsung, now-forgotten fellow producers. None the less, Yentob managed to cop enough of the credit to turn himself into the medium's coming man.
In 1986, he became controller of BBC2, where he gave the arts a respected regular forum in The Late Show and commissioned undisputed triumphs such as Have I Got News For You and Absolutely Fabulous. Switching to BBC1 in 1993, this archetypal sophisticate found populism more of a challenge but applied himself manfully to the task. His reward was promotion to director of television.
This was the turbulent era of John Birt, necessarily an awkward time for a man who had come to be seen at the Beeb (not only by himself) as the creatives' champion. None the less, Yentob avoided the temptation to give succour to mutinous producers. On the contrary, he started talking management-speak and studying audience demographics.
As Birt's departure loomed, he appeared perfectly positioned to inherit the prize for which he seemed he have been placed on earth. The new director general would need to restore battered morale in the studios. Who better to do this than the (now house-trained) creatives' candidate?
Yentob did not even reach the short-list. Perhaps his preference for excellence over ratings counted against him. However, there were other factors. One governor was reported as saying: "It was pretty clear after his interviews that he wasn't going to make it. The man can't finish a sentence." One problem was Yentob's reputation for being incapable of any kind of organisation and hopeless at decision-making. He is said to walk out of meetings, perhaps to take a phone call, and never return, having forgotten the meeting completely. In a creative visionary, such behaviour may be acceptable - useful even, in generating an impression of dreamy other-worldliness. But to run a £2.5bn-a-year corporation, the governors decided that someone a little more together was required.
Yentob was rumoured to have done a deal with the leading outside candidate, Greg Dyke, which would at least make him deputy DG if Dyke came out on top. Sadly, even this was not to be. Today, Yentob presides over drama, entertainment and children's television. He professes himself content, and seems genuinely valued by Dyke, partly because of his skill at soft-soaping the talent. His pleas for more quality and less pap are listened to, if not heeded. He is being given a shot at presenting an arts show himself. An £81,000 bonus took his total earnings from the licence-payer last year to £302,000.
He still gets to go to all the best parties. He lives stylishly with his partner - whom he met in a BBC canteen - in a four-storey house located, naturally, in Notting Hill. The couple have an 11-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter. All the same, nothing can disguise the grim reality. The great man's BBC career has passed its zenith. Former proteges such as Michael Jackson, who became Channel 4's boss when Yentob might have done, have overtaken him. "Botney", as Private Eye styles him, is treading water.
Hence, perhaps, his willingness to take on the ICA. It is not a task which everyone would relish. The institute's grand premises in The Mall highlight its current plight. Once famed for fostering the bohemian avant-garde, it now rubs shoulders with Buck House. Go there today, and you're more likely to find Japanese tourists seeking Swinging London than creative movers and shakers. The young artists, poets and sculptors have moved on. They no longer need the guidance of superior beings: they're doing their own thing in low-rent ateliers in the back streets of Walthamstow, more interested in attracting Charles Saatchi's patronage than in the approval of institutional worthies.
So what might our BBC lion bring to this challenged concern? His genuine enthusiasm for anything to do with art is not in doubt. He has plenty of experience of the workings of artistic bodies, though his achievements on all those boards are far from apparent. Cynics suggest that the organisations involved ask him to join only in the hope of TV exposure. At the ICA, he will face a sharp operator in the shape of Philip Dodd, the full-time director, who has no intention of being steered anywhere by anyone. Ominously perhaps, Dodd, who worked with Yentob in the old Arena days, is delighted with the latter's appointment and looks forward to a "collaborative" relationship.
Dodd does not deny an interest in plundering that awesome contacts book, but this could prove counter-productive. The last thing the ICA needs is the attentions of fading superstars. Its future, if it has one, lies in recapturing its lost nose for infant genius, perhaps through more exercises such as its successful Becks Futures Award. Yentob has certainly been supportive of the BBC's "Northern Initiative", which fishes for new talent in the provinces. But such work takes time. How much will Yentob be able to spare from all those glitzy parties?
Maybe he will surprise us yet. Maybe, in this unpromising arena, Alan Yentob will at last fulfil his fading promise and make a real mark on the cultural life of Britain. Regrettably, such an outcome doesn't seem that likely.
